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Norwegian experts have been left baffled by a ‘tropical' downpour that hit a village north of Trondheim on Monday. “This only happens in the jungle,” said one meteorologist.

The onslaught came suddenly on Monday afternoon, with an estimated 102mm of rain bucketing down on the village of Ogndal in a single hour, followed by heavy hail which left a layer of ice across the area.

“This just does not happen in Norway, we have a hard time believing that it's true,” Geir Ottar Fagerli, a government meteorologist, told NRK. “It's not that we doubt the observations, but it is absolutely amazing.”

“These are figures ​​that you only normally see in the jungle,” he continued, estimating that the country's unofficial record is probably somewhere between 80-90mm per hour.

Kristin Wåtland Delbekk, a farmer and tourist guide who has lived in the village for 28 years said that she had never seen anything like it.

"It was horrible. There was such a lot of rain in one hour. It was so strange for us," she told The Local. "The animals were really afraid, the cows don't understand what was happening."

Fagerli said that the downpour almost certainly qualified as a Norwegian record, but said that as there are no monitoring stations in the area, it would have to remain an unofficial one.